Time to knuckle down and write that short story

LOOSE LEAVES:The Francis MacManus short-story competition gets its timing so right. The closing date for the 2012 competition is January 20th – enough time to put entering the prestigious contest part of a new year's resolution must-do list for writers who have always promised themselves they'd finally get it together to submit a story.

The competition has been on the go for 26 years, and the prize (aside from the top award of €3,000 in addition) is the chance to have your work read out on RTÉ Radio 1. The recordings of each of the 25 shortlisted stories are broadcast after the announcement of the competition winners, next June. See rte.ie/radio1.

Book six-week loan of a superb library for children

Siobhán Parkinson, Laureate na nÓg, and Children’s Books Ireland have come up with a brilliant way to make interesting books more available to children.

The Laureate International Library, made up of 100 Irish and international children’s books selected by Parkinson, is housed in a transportable display case and available for six-week loans to schools and libraries.

"English-speaking readers are often not aware that old favourites such as Pinocchioand Pippi Longstocking

were originally written in languages other than English,” says Parkinson. “School libraries have lost their funding in recent times. This is very serious, especially at a time when reading is under threat and literacy levels are lamentable.”

Schools and libraries can request a loan from info@childrensbooksireland.ie.

Are women crime writers better than men? Discuss

Women write unputdownable scarifying crime and women readers can't get enough of the bloodiest spine-chilling plots. So it's reasonable to ask whether the female writer has the edge over her counterparts. That's the theme of a discussion taking place this Thursday at 8pm at the National Library of Ireland, on Kildare Street in Dublin. The panel of writers includes Alex Barclay, author of Blood Runs Cold, and Arlene Hunt, author of The Chosen.Admission €5. info@nli.ie.

Did all those things really happen this year?

Maybe it's a quirk of memory or just the way time works, but leafing through The Irish Times Book of the Year 2011(Gill Macmillan) the was-that-really- this-year? moments pile up: the terrifying earthquake that hit Japan (so brilliantly caputured by Tokyo resident David McNeill), Micheál Martin becoming leader of Fianna Fáil ("a paragon of radical reform who languished in Cabinet for 14 years", as Miriam Lord so wittily put it) and the Anglo Irish Bank sign being unceremoniously taken down. (How did it take so long?) It's worth sitting back to take stock of how the Nama, Anglo and Quinn stories spun out in 2011 and read Simon Carswell, Paul Cullen and Colm Keena's clearsighted take on events. Edited by Peter Murtagh, the glossy hardback – the photographs and Martyn Turner's cartoons are worth the the price alone – has become a Christmas must-have for many readers: a year's worth of articles with human-interest tales and several injections of laugh-out-loud humour to balance the business, politics and economics stories.